today was a good day

I made an interesting foray into desktop development today. So what had happened was... our COO, one of the lead developers of AIM back in the day, says that he can build a desktop widget for this alerts system that I've been working on with Adam and my manager Carrie. In a day. Clearly, I'm not going to take that kind of smack talk, even if it's coming from a programming stud. I did some research into GUI development and hacked out this widget in a day. I was going to challenge the dude to a race, but I'm assuming he has better shit to do than participate in code dick measuring contests with some random analyst. Moral of the story though... don't fucking call me out like that, especially when it comes to programming and drinking contests.

C++ is not as bad as everyone makes it out to be, but largely because Qt is so freaking AWESOME. The signals and slots system it uses is very intuitive and it makes hacking the Windows desktop total cake. It also has extensions to basically every data type in C++. Instead of string you use QString. Instead of lists you have QLists and its bastard offspring. It's almost like writing Java except you have the C++ level of control over memory. And finally it has a surprising number of modules for... well... anything you want to do. SQL, HTTP, OpenGL, XML etc. etc. Very sweet. I'll definitely be trying some more things in Qt and C++. Yeah I know that there's Python and LISP integration. I'm finally following Saffer's advice to learn a programming language that doesn't hold your hand with memory management.

Also, I got my iPhone 3GS today. After a week of complete isolation, this is quite the relief. What probably didn't help was deactivating my Facebook account. Terrible idea.